The memoir industry

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

“The Brat in Your Classroom,’’ Michael John Carley’s memoir of his troubled time at Moses Brown School, in Providence, in the ‘70s in the Oct. 27 Providence Journal, was often a good read, including sometimes quite funny, and I must assume much of it was accurate. (He includes pictures of teachers’ comments from the time.) The enthusiastically self-promotional Mr. Carley, who’s on the autism spectrum, identified himself as a “playwright, a diplomat, executive director of nonprofits,’’ along with having had other impressive roles. He described such nasty if usefully cinematic episodes as being beaten by the police. Was all this fact-checked? As my father used to say: “Remarkable, remarkable, if true.’’

The piece falls into the rapidly growing category of memoirs detailing the overcoming of tough problems of youth – presented in sort of made-for-TV-or-the movies narratives – and it speaks to Americans’ greater and greater obsession with themselves, as reflected in social media and elsewhere. Of course, we’re all at the center of our personal universes, but we’ve been taking that to extremes lately.

Eli Pariser, the chief executive of Upworthy, a Web site for "meaningful" viral content, has noted:

“We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.’’

Perhaps in an age when promoting one’s “personal brand’’ is granted such economic importance this is inevitable. And naturally most of us have the desire, especially as we approach old age, to try to make sense of our messy histories and to control the narrative, if only for our children. And don’t underestimate the desire for revenge, expiation and, if the storyteller is a particularly strong writer, money.

Of course a major attraction to running such magazine-style pieces in The Journal (where I labored as an editor on and off for decades and that I still loyally read daily) is that you don’t need paid local reporters to fill up that space with news, of all things. Another, and to me stranger, thing is the increasing number of long tributes to the paper’s own remaining staffers in the paper – space that might otherwise be used for news, if only from other newspapers and news services. It comes under the heading of meta:

Definition: “Referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential’’. This is happening in many other now very short-staffed newspapers, too.